How a Mark Morris Dance Reimagines Love

The choreographer Mark Morris has been more retro than radical in his choice of movement. His brands of precise choreographic musicality and stylistic eclecticism have roots that go back decades — indeed centuries.

Yet the mind he showed in his early dances was and remains modern. Mr. Morris, who turns 62 this month, emerged during the 1980s. By the end of that decade, he was an international celebrity. His “Love Song Waltzes” (1989) returns to New York, at the Rose Theater on Thursday as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival; it remains a good example of his worldview.

Its title is a translation of “Liebeslieder Walzer,” Brahms’s 1868 arrangement of 18 love songs, for four voices and two pianists, all in waltz tempo. The words are a folk version of romance, while the music seems to be a pretty parlor reduction of Romanticism.

So how did this modern choreographer set love songs from an era in which women were widely viewed as “the fairer sex”? When Mr. Morris made “Love Song Waltzes,” feminism had already begun to change the world’s view of women, while the pall cast by AIDS had transformed our view of love’s suffering.

Just look at its third song. “O women! how they delight and melt the heart!” Brahms’s two male voices, tenor and bass, fondly, sighingly, invoke their charms: “I should long since have turned monk were it not for women!”

Such raptures seem sweet but antique — so it’s natural to Mr. Morris to subvert them.

This number begins with a man on the floor, twisting and gesturing tenderly up at his female partner as if she’s the muse who inspires him:

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Two other couples have entered (upstage left), in the conventional steps of a ballroom waltz. At first, all seems polite, like the words. Still, the dancers’ vocabulary at all points stays close to what used to be called democratic dance, the quality of non-virtuoso pedestrian movement close to our everyday lives. Even when they waltz, they don’t have the lifted posture and arching polish of the best ballroom performers; they’re more ornery than that.

Then that central couple grows thoroughly ambiguous. The man seems to wallow on the floor in his own emotionalism; the woman is partly distanced (and partly complicit):

As for those other waltzing couples, now see what happens. The men arch back — rapturous, trusting — in their women’s arms. Whereupon the women promptly drop them — splat! — to the floor.

Or rather the women let the men fall; the men pivot as they go, so that they arrive (splat!) face down. That splat fall has already occurred at the end of the second song of “Love Song Waltzes.”

And so it becomes one of the work’s motifs. Oh, these women: They make you swoon, and then they stand there aloof as you collapse at their feet.

On the surface, Brahms’s music is gentility itself. But both words and music address love’s pains as well as its joys; and they move between forceful attack and tender inwardness. And “Love Song Waltzes” makes plain that love is not merely a matter for couples: This dance is about community and isolated individuals as well.

In the seventh song, the mezzo-soprano sings “All seemed rosy at one time with my life … But now, alas, though I stand right in front of his cool gaze, neither his eyes nor his heart take note of me.”

Brahms doesn’t take only an exterior view of women; this is the most internalized expression of love’s anguish. Mr. Morris sets it as a female solo (Lauren Grant in this video). Tellingly, she scarcely dances. In turmoil, she moves through the body language of erotic affliction.

She turns to face one corner, then the opposite corner; she arches up to face the sky and immediately pivots to face the floor; she descends and crawls. Paradoxically, she reaches stillness only when she’s in a position of maximum tension and travail, sitting with legs raised and exposed:

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Next, she inverts that position into its upside-down opposite. Though she’s still folded in misery, she averts her face, chest, and thigh from audience gaze:

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And she ends in a version of that sitting-travail position, until the next song begins:

Most of “Love Song Waltzes” consists of ensembles; but Mr. Morris keeps showing that these contain multiple private lives. This dramatic conception reaches its most violent point during the 11th song with a series of four short, fast, identical solos, a canon in which dancer follows dancer in the same powerful moves:

The most striking image is the sideways jump with legs parted in which the dancer’s torso tilts in the direction of the advancing leg, then jerks back the opposite way, with a jackknife quality:

It’s as if the dancers want to travel where their impetus is taking them — but no: They then recoil from it. And the men have the same steps as the women. Mr. Morris lampooned conventional sexist behavior earlier on: His larger point is that men and women often behave just the same.

In Mr. Morris’s world, not only are same-sex couples equal to opposite-sex ones, but women can be propulsive, and men submissive. This was the view of gender with which modern dance began to transform itself in the 1980s; Mr. Morris was among its earliest exponents. (It took ballet another 30 years to catch up.)

Brahms’s 10th song is about how gently a stream meanders through a meadow; that is, how sweet love is when it’s requited. Mr. Morris choreographs six couples as they stream, repeating the same phrase one after another. Look how his third and fourth couples here are female-female and female-male: the women lift their partners in adorably rhythmic skips:

Those lifted skips! Whatever the gender, they catch the change in Brahms’s meter — but, more than that, they catch the buoyancy in a lover’s heart:

Mr. Morris’s dancers are barefoot. You watch them not for bravura combinations of arduous steps but for unvarnished truthfulness. Over almost 40 years — the Mark Morris Dance Group was formed in 1980 — they have exemplified something that Mikhail Baryshnikov, speaking in the 1980s, identified in Mr. Morris as “outrageous honesty.”

Alastair Macaulay has been the chief dance critic since 2007. He was previously the chief theater critic of The Financial Times, the chief dance critic for The Times Literary Supplement and the founding editor of the quarterly Dance Theatre Journal. @AMacaulayNYT